Monthly Archives: January 2021

Ratcatcher   Lynne Ramsey (UK; 1999) William Eadie, Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews

viewed Mubi 14 Jan 2021

After image

‘Ratcatcher’s’ opening shot is a slow motion long duration close up of a young lad as he twines and twists a net curtain around his head, surrendering to the immediacy of the moment. Seeing his visage through the delicate tracery of the lace, the boy’s image calls to mind the experience of an archaeologist who on removing the last bandages from a mummified corpse, catches a momentary glimpse of its face last seen thousands of years back, which then almost immediately turns to dust.

Lynne Ramsey’s ‘Ratcatcher’ sets its stall out from the beginning as a quasi mythical recasting, a re-representation of life in the slums of Glasgow. The poverty, the trampled lives, the daily struggle are all represented in this milieu. But they are not her central focus. Her concern is to express this place not so much for what makes it particular but rather for the universal psychic qualities it shares with human experience  No matter that this is neither Ancient Greece nor ancestral Alba. But look, here in the Glaswegian tenements there’s a primordial landscape in which archetypal characters play out myriad variations of mythic themes.

Running at the back of the old tenement blocks is a living river. Its spirits have coursed through the lives of all who have ever lived here. It’s a stream that in particular attracts and holds the young in its traces. These waters are an ever present motif coursing through the film which is set in the 1970’s. A time when the long strike of the rubbish men causes huge piles of black bags to pile up in the tenements and from the river comes the visitation of a plague of rats upon the people.  

‘Ratcatcher’s’ scenario is set in an unstable in-between time. A time between heaven and earth, between movement out of the old slum built by the river into the new arcadian housing development built by fields of barley. A drama is played out in the opposition between the old river gods of the slum and the coming gods of the new estate, a citadel of hope built close to the fruits of the earth.   Abandoned, the old river gods demand a human life and claim as their victim, Ryan the young boy seen in the first shot already shrouded as if preparing for his own sacrifice, his drowning in the waters.

Ramsey’s script is a patchwork of themes and mythical strips that interlink to provide a mosaic like depiction of her subject.   She doesn’t use narrative. ‘Ratcatcher’ is an impressionistic imprint of evanescent experiences which nevertheless like the face of the mummy suddenly exposed to air, leave an indelible psychic scar. Her guide over and beyond the Styx is Jamie. In the script Jamie is fitted out with a full family but from way in which he moves through the scenario, Jamie is an orphan archetype whose fate is not linked to the past but is determined by other cosmic forces.   Jamie in the Celtic tradition is accorded the status of seer, one who is guided by visions and dreams. Ramsey occasionally uses point of view shots, but mainly we watch Jamie, the object of the camera, as he moves through space and time entering into relations of life and death.

Scouring the land, patrolling the river are the Glaswegian gangs. Violent unpredictible hunters re-incarnates of the Fenians bands or Tuartha, but with nothing to hunt, they vent their warrior frustration on whatever crosses their path. The central female character is the young post-pubescent girl who takes on the opposing roles of sacred prostitute and virgin bride. Whore to the Fenians but sacred virgin to the chaste James who like Finn macCoul relates to seeing as much as to being. As Jamie’s dad becomes a ‘hero’, the river yields life in the form of fish insects and rats, so Jamie sees the escape to the newly constructed housing estate on the edge of town, surrounded by fields of gold. But as we see images of the gorgeous wind swept barley, and the last image of the film sees the family running through it, the thought occurs that the mythic cannot be avoided by simple re-location. In the midst of the fields although they have escaped the river gods ands spirits, John Barleycorn lies in wait.

There will be those who watch this film and be troubled by Ramsey’s assembly of mythic types in the slums of Glasgow. In particular her depiction of the young girl, whore and virgin.  However it seems to be a core premise of her movie that she is not setting ‘Ratcatcher’ up as a judgement machine. ‘Ratcatcher’ sets itself to catch something else, physic reverberations. Ramsey is looking at reflections in the mirror of life and understanding these as archetypal images not ideals: violent gangs as deterritorialised Fenians, child whores, boy seers. All existing in this microcosm of a Glaswegian slum in phantom archaic form that stand apart from political correctness or conventional values.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Festen (Celebration)   Thomas Vinterberg (Den; 1998) Ulrich Thomsen, Paprika Stein, Thomas Larsen

viewed on MUBI 7^th Jan 2021

Overloaded

‘Festen’ was the first feature film produced after the Dogma 95 declaration which was written by Vinterberg and Von Trier. Dogma 95 was a film makers manifesto, pledging commitment by the signatories to a code of film making practice (‘The vows of chastity’, so called). Like most such artistic manifestos it was a manifestation of silliness (Frank Capra once said: ‘There are no rules in film making only sins and the cardinal sin is dullness) but of course Vinterberg and Von Trier knew that the sillier their Manifesto, the more seriously it would be taken by film critics and thus fulfil its purpose: assure them lots of publicity.

Taken on its own terms Vinterberg’s ‘Festen’ delivers a film that in structure content and style, takes its cue from the core traditions of European film making. ‘Festen’ as a product of Dogma simply exemplifies continuity of film structure and form as exemplified by directors such as Renoir, Vigo, Bresson, and of course Luis Bunuel. Bunuel never bothered with manifestos, but many of his films fall within the parameters and technical imperatives of filmmaking set out in Dogma 95.   In respect to content it is Bunuel’s perspective as a film maker that Vinterberg also animates and re-visions. Two of Bunuel’s outstanding films, the Exterminating Angel and Viridiana, involve themes central to Festen: Epater le bourgeoisie: to make movies that are transgressive, blasphemous and that expose the hypocrisy of the middle classes and their rituals of eternity.

Bunuel’s aimed his satiric barbs mainly at the Catholic Church; Vinterberg points his camera at ‘the family’ which by the twentieth century, with the invention of man the consumer, has replaced religion as the West’s most sacred institution. It is no longer possible to offend by blaspheming God, it is the family has become the quasi religious symbol of the times.   The family is the subject of Vinterberg’s movie. His setting is the 60^th Birthday celebrations of a paterfamilias, the patriarch Helge.  The invited guests are his three surviving children, Christian Michael Helene and a host of other relatives, all summoned in effect to render their homage. Missing from the celebration is Christian’s twin Linda, who has committed suicide earlier in the year. ‘Festen’ is to the ritualised family gathering what the Black Mass is to the Holy Eucharist. It is a desecration of a sacred ritual that profanely mimics the very form that it inverts. The host at this communion is raised up not to be blessed but to be pissed on, spat at, reviled.

‘Festen’ is a comedy of manners that ridicules the complacency and inertia of the middle classes. When Christian exposes the gross sexual abuse perpetrated by his father on himself and Linda, the gathered family prefer to continue eating their celebratory dinner as if nothing had happened. They act as if they have heard nothing; at all costs embarrassment is to be avoided and everything should just continue exactly as before. All would be well if the inertia of the event was allowed to take its due and predictable course.  The scandal would simply go away if everyone surrendered to the soothing rhythms of the meal: the toasts, the soup course, the main course, the dessert, the wines the brandy and cigars in the drawing room. Everyone could, sort of, pretend nothing had happened.

As course follows course at ‘Festen’s’ birthday gathering, an atmosphere is engendered that is similar to the situation in ‘The Exterminating Angel’. Bunuel uses ‘The Exterminating Angel’ to depict the emptiness of the mannered classes as the guests at a smart cocktail party find themselves unable to leave. Each attempt to leave further enmeshes them in the folds of the event. The lack of awareness of what is happening, the desire to continue as if nothing were happening has parallels with elements of the ‘Festen’ script. Unlike Bunuel’s movie, Vinterberg’s scripting employs a series of intensifications, as the provocateur Christian, refusing to be silenced returns repeatedly to his allegations, escalating the charges levelled against Helge which are finally vindicated by Linda’s retrieved suicide note.

As in Bunuel’s two films, much of the humour in Vinterberg’s script is grounded in the structured opposition between the escalating violence of Christian’s accusations of sexual abuse, and the imperturbable aspect of the formal 60^th birthday celebrations which continue like clockwork. Finally reaching to the point where Helge, after admitting to his crimes simply vacates the table as if leaving a boardroom meeting after being voted out as chairman. The family has become a corporate body.

‘Festen’ is superbly served by its actors as a set piece requiring both collective company discipline and strong idiosyncratic characterisation. But it is the stylistic imprint of the camera work, reinforced by the edit, that defines the film. The hand held camera, as per the ‘Dogma’ ‘Rules of Chastity’, works to energise the setting creating a vibrancy of relations between the main characters and the large numbers of extras filling out the screen as Helge’s friends and relations. The edit complements the camera movement with the cutting jagged and on the move. The end result is to make ‘Festen’ a stylistic statement of involvement that works on the audience both subjectively and objectively. The camera work creates an agitated framing analogous to the subjective experience of these sort of events: interactions that are superficial, unfinished , interrupted, half understood. Objectively the camera work and edit create a mood of edginess, inter-shot tension, insecurity, that sets up both the nature and manner of Christian’s interventions and underscores the brittle nature inherent in the pretensions of family ideology.

Vinterberg works two diversions into his script. Parallel to the events taking place at the festive table the scenario tracks the events under the stairs in the kitchen where the multicourse feast is being prepared. The representation of this other world, the servants and their complex relations with their masters, works both as a muted reminder of other social realities necessary to keep the façade in order. It also functions as a distraction, a de-intensifer that takes the heat out of the main action. I thought at one stage that the ‘kitchen’ and the relations within it might have a key role in the play out of events in the dining room. This didn’t materialise but nevertheless the kitchen provided another perspective on the family upstairs.

The second diversion was the arrival of Gbatokai, Helene’s black boyfriend. An arrival that immediately cues a racist reaction from Michael, a reaction that is taken up and repeated by the whole party when the boyfriend joins the table. My feeling is that there is not room in the ‘Festen’ script to shape a response to this racism. The whole film is directed towards the outcome of ‘exposure’ of ‘revelation of truth’. All the energy of the film is targeted towards those moments where we see this family for the ‘lie’ that it is. The addition of the black boyfriend, sub theme – motif, simply reveals something of which the audience are already aware: these people are vile bodies, unpleasant destructive human beings. The consequence of trying to overload ‘Festen’ with another social concern is that the occurrence of a casual socially primed racism is relegated to a mere script appendage, a secondary concern which few people who see the film will probably remember. It looks like this strand of the script has been included without being thought through. The problem is that as victim of the racist atmosphere Gbatokai is simply left to play second fiddle to the main concern of the film. Whereas the forces of righteousness in relation to the abusive father are finally justified and vindicated, the racist abuse is simply something that Gbatokai has to suffer. He has a few resources to confront the horror that assaults him. In the maelstrom of the melodramatic finale, he’s consigned to being wallpaper. My feeling is that Vinterberg should have seen that overloading his script with a somewhat gratuitously introduced secondary theme was an act of bad faith in his key material.   Viewed some twenty years after Festen’s original release, the role of the black boyfriend and its cursory treatment in the scenario castes a shadow over the production.

As Gbatokai was writen into Festen’ he should have been acorded action. Had Lars von Trier made this movie, at the moment of revelatory truth the reading of Linda’s letter, Gbatokai would have picked up the cheese knife, climbed up on the table and smashing through the crockery and glass strode across to Helge and buried the knife in his belly.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk